On Father’s Day, I can finally afford
to view my father’s good side again

By David McElroy · June 17, 2018

This is the first time in many years when I haven’t felt a horrible sense of dread about Father’s Day.

My father expected to be honored and acknowledged on Father’s Day, but I quit doing that a long time ago, because I decided I couldn’t continue to be that dishonest. Instead, the day became an annual reminder of the tension between the praise he wanted and the reality of what I needed to say to him.

When I kept trying to get him to talk with me about the past — and how he treated me in that present — he used to get angry and say, “Nobody gives me any credit for all the things I did for you children.”

That wasn’t true, but when you need to get someone to look at the abuse he’s inflicted on you (and continues to inflict), you’re in no mood to recount anything good about him. Now that he’s dead — and no longer stalking me online and showing up at my door unannounced — I can finally allow myself to look at his positive side once again.

My father was a monster. I’ve shared some examples of that over the last couple of months. But he could also be a decent, loving and caring man. The problem is that I never knew which side of him I was going to get.

When I was young, he had me convinced that he was perfect. It was a childhood version of Stockholm Syndrome. I depended on him so much that I couldn’t afford to recognize what he was doing to us. He was all I knew — and I accepted that he was right about everything.

Because of that, I thought he was a great father for a long time.

It wasn’t until my mid to late 20s when I started feeling uneasy enough — and had enough distance from him — to start seeing the truth. My youngest sister first suggested that we had been through an abusive childhood, but I wouldn’t hear anything of it. I angrily rejected her thoughts about it. She and I have disagreed about many things over the years, but on this point, she saw the scary parts far before I did.

When I was 25, I published a personal column for Father’s Day in the newspaper where I was managing editor at the time. I praised what my father had done for us and I painted a very complimentary picture of him. I still have a copy of that article, but I can’t bring myself to read it anymore. I’ve let a few people read it over the years, just to illustrate how far I had to come to understand what he had done to us, but for years it’s angered me that I ever praised him for anything.

As long as he was alive — and constantly showing that he had no respect for his children or healthy boundaries — it was hard for me to talk anymore about his good. I was too angry with him and it was already hard to get other people to understand why I would have cut off contact with my own father. Most people weren’t willing to understand, so I concentrated on explaining the abuse so they might understand — and so they wouldn’t judge me.

Now that he’s gone, it’s different.

I can now remember good times that I would have angrily ignored not long ago. It doesn’t change any of the abuse, but it fleshes out a picture of someone who was mentally ill rather than evil.

I appreciate that he insisted I learn proper grammar from an early age. As soon as we could speak, he insisted that we speak correctly. His methods could be extreme at times, but I can appreciate the fact that I always knew how to speak and write clearly. Every English class I ever had was a breeze, because I grew up being taught to use language correctly and to express myself clearly.

I appreciate that he taught us practical skills that I see missing in a lot of children. Far earlier than other kids, I could count money and make correct change and tell time. He taught me the basics of algebra when I was in about third grade, so math classes always seemed easy until I hit calculus.

I appreciate that he taught me how to be socially proper with strangers. From an early age, I could dress properly for an occasion and I could walk into any room with confidence — under pretty much any circumstances — and I could have conversations with adults that made them think I was a man in a little boy suit. Even when I didn’t want to be nice or polite, I knew how to act with others under pretty much any circumstances. That skill continues to serve me well.

I appreciate the way he taught me about sex. When I was in the second grade, I started thinking about my mother’s euphemistic response when my sisters and I had asked her where babies came from. She said it was when a man and woman loved each other and were with each other. As we washed dishes — as a family — one Sunday afternoon, I asked him why unmarried people didn’t get pregnant if a man and woman just had to be with one another. Later that afternoon, he had a very thorough conversation with me to explain sex and its relationship to love and marriage. As a result, I was never shy or embarrassed about sex. It was never presented to me as anything shameful, so I never saw it that way.

I appreciate that he left a good career — with a high-paying job — to stay home with us full time after he and Mother divorced. Until then, we had had a live-in housekeeper. He decided that if our mother wasn’t ever coming back, he needed to be home with us all the time. He first went back to teaching and then to a series of other jobs in which he struggled — all because he gave up a lot of money to do what he thought was right for us.

I appreciate the fact that he wanted to help other people. Even though I later found out that the money he used to help was embezzled money, he gave away a lot of money. He helped individuals in trouble and he gave money to things he thought mattered. He didn’t want public credit for what he gave. After he gave our church a large sum of money to buy many books for the church library, he was only upset about one thing. He had specified that nobody know who the money came from, but the church had put the standard stickers on the books saying whose donations paid for them. He insisted the stickers be removed. He honestly didn’t want anyone to think he was doing that for public thanks.

I appreciate that he was willing to help me about 12 years ago when I made a short film. I didn’t have time during production to be the daily bookkeeper paying everything that had to be paid, so I gave him the money and he doled it out according to my instructions every day. He never really understood my desire to create art, but he did understand accounting.

My father was a complicated man. He was a monster. He was also a kind and loving person. Ultimately, he was a man who suffered from narcissistic personality disorder and managed to push away everyone who wanted to love him.

I regret that he would never allow us to have a balanced relationship with him. I regret that he was so unable to overcome the malignant narcissism in him that he couldn’t get the help he needed — help which might have enabled him to find a healthy relationship with children who were more than willing to love him — and with others in his life who loved him until his lies and dysfunction ran them away.

The photo above is the last picture I ever took of him. About a month before I cut ties with him, I met him at the Apple Store in Birmingham so he could look at an iPad and I could explain it to him. I have no idea what possessed me to shoot this — because I never took random pictures of him — but I pulled out my iPhone and quietly shot one photo. He was about 78 or 79 at the time.

At least for now, this is the picture I have in my mind of him — a complex man who was overcome by demons that developed in his own home as a child. Now that he’s dead, I hope I’ll be able to see him in a balanced light for the first time in my life. I have no desire to whitewash the ways in which he abused us — or the ways in which he hurt other people — but I can finally afford not to be angry with him all the time.

I will not be the kind of father he was. When I was young, I was afraid to have children, because I feared I might be too much like him. It’s taken me many years of learning and self-improvement to know that I won’t be like him. I hope that when I have my own children, though, I’ll be able to avoid his mistakes while emulating certain things he got right.

I don’t wish he were still here for me to see him or talk with him on Father’s Day. I don’t regret cutting ties to that toxic relationship. I am completely at peace that I made the right decisions about him.

But for the first time in decades, I can finally think about the good and the bad in him — acknowledging the truth of both — and wish his spirit a happy Father’s Day.

Share on Social Networks

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

Related Posts